winner is...

Academic Obesity, Cognition, and WarningsSociety: from the Sordid History of Eugenics and Scientific Racism

BY SARAH R. ZINN University of Chicago (United States)

Globally, adult obesity rates have nearly tripled since 1975. In the U.S., rates have risen from 15 percent in 1999 to 42 percent in 2018 and one out of every three children aged 2-19 is now being classified as overweight or obese. Indeed, the World Health Organization warns that “obesity is becoming the greatest healthcare burden affecting European society.” In most dominant first-world cultures, the social construction of obesity is of a preventable and catastrophic disease epidemic with a staggering economic burden to society caused by poor personal lifestyle choices. Here, I will outline a different perspective with important scientific and societal implications. Since the attribution of obesity as a poor personal choice, the prioritization of consequences to society, and long-held views of dualism and religious ideology interact to fuel an entrenched stigmatization of fat bodies as an indicator of a “willful” mental weakness and therefore moral failure, researchers exploring the relationship between obesity and cognition must start grappling with the ethical concerns of stereotype confirmation in this vulnerable population. Powerful ethical lessons from science’s history argue that special care, attention to detail, and counterinduction are essential when conducting and interpreting stereotype-confirming research on obesity, neurocognition, and intelligence—care which is vital both for the ethical conduct of science and for the objective pursuit of knowledge. l